Category Archives: party

We passed a milestone recently which deserves some celebration: OpenStreetMap has now reached 1 million map contributors. Over the lifetime of our project, 1,000,000 different users have created a user account and made edits to the map! 1 million is a big number, and the growth of our community continues apace.

“At its core, OpenStreetMap is all about humans sharing knowledge about the places they visit, live and work in. Our fantastic project is only possible thanks to over a million individuals who generously volunteer their time to help others find their way in the world.”Peter Barth – OSMF board

If you haven’t tried contributing to OpenStreetMap yet, it’s not too late to join a million others! sign up today and map your neighbourhood!

You may remember we celebrated 1 million users way back in 2013, but that was the count of signed up users — an impressive number, but not everyone who signed up has yet contributed to the map (Why have users signed up but not contributed? The reasons for this have been described in variousways over the years but similar participation patterns are seen in many online communities)

Simon Poole has been crunching the changeset logs and watching the count of map contributors tick past 1 million:

2017 has been a good year for OpenStreetMap and the OpenStreetMap foundation. Many things happened and have been achieved that push our project even further. As not everyone was able to watch out for all that great news, we’ll highlight some of 2017’s events and give you some pointers for a further read.

Kate Chapman rounded off the year with her chairperson’s report in which she highlighted the growth of the Foundation membership, enabling it to further support our project. We have almost 900 foundation members in December 2017, which is in part a success of our membership drive last year. In addition to our individual members, we have an additional 24 corporate members, thanks to our new corporate membership program which took effect on Jan 1, 2017. Besides many renewals and tier upgrades we were able to welcome two new bronze members and five new gold members, with many big players on the list. Corporate memberships are a great way for some of our biggest data users to help remove the financial burden from our mappers who already donate so much of their valued time. A larger number of corporate members also makes us less dependent on single large donors. This is a great success.

Let us not forget that it’s the mappers who ultimately power our great geographical data though, and as foundation membership has grown, so has the number of mappers. In the final weeks of 2017 we hit the milestone of 1 million map contributors! We’ll bring you some more details of what that means in another blog post. One big boost to our contributor numbers that received much public attention was Pokémon Go. The news coverage about this game making use of OpenStreetMap data encouraged many players to go edit OpenStreetMap. Back then, we even published a blog post with tips to help new mappers coming from Pokémon Go. While the Foundation and its Data Working Group received some complaints about bad edits related to the game, many more trainers made valuable changes to the map. And in the end, players with constructive, fact-based edits persisted and continue to enrich our project.

OpenStreetMap is a large project with a worldwide community and as such, we’re quite diverse. That’s also why the OpenStreetMap Foundation is pushing for more Local Chapters (LCs) to form local representations of OpenStreetMap enthusiasts. That being said, we’ve been able to welcome three(!) new Local Chapters last year already. OSM UK, was last year’s first new addition (welcome!), followed by OpenStreetMap France (welcome!). Technically there has been a third one early in December 2017! But hold your horses. We’ll be bringing an announcement of that one very soon! That means the OSMF has six Local Chapters as of now, and hopefully at least two more LCs will follow in 2018. By the way, if you’re from a local community and are interested in starting your own Local Chapter or just want to chat about it or seek input, we had some meetups at the last two SotM conferences with new ideas and have revived the local-chapters mailing list for that reason.

Speaking of SotM, the global annual conference of OpenStreetMap went to Japan this year. State Of The Map 2017 was another fantastic event, and our busy organizing committee (one of the foundation working groups which you can join!) is already ramping up to bring together the 2018 conference in Milan, Italy.

Speaking of the OSMF board, we had board elections in December 2017 and want to take the chance to congratulate Heather Leson and Paul Norman for being voted to the board! This year’s elections have been somewhat exhausting with about 50 different threads and about 600 messages on the foundation members’ list, compared to not even half that many during the rest of the year. The language was a bit heated at times, although there were also quite a lot of interesting and valuable discussions. Let’s hope that some of this energy and passion will be channelled into year-round community involvement in foundation matters.

And so, with a great and eventful 2017 coming to an end, we’re welcoming 2018, looking forward to yet another great year for OpenStreetMap!

As if your 8am to 6pm State of the Map schedule was not social enough, we are packing your Saturday night with an officially sponsored State of the Map social event. And it will definitely be an event worth remembering as we convene both in silo and in style at the Brussels Event Brewery. Named after the huge tanks (‘silos’) of the former brewery, this multi functional industrial area will be home base for Belgian beers (aka drink), Belgian food (aka frites) and maybe a Belgian waffle or two.

Come join us after the social presentations close on Saturday, September 24th for the official State of the Map 2016 social event! The details for your fast recall:

Last December we had a hack weekend in London, thanks to AOL UK/MapQuest (my employer) for donating meeting space in their offices and food. About 20 people turned up and did some awesome stuff and we, at the Engineering Working Group, thought you might be interested in what went on and perhaps running your own event.

OSMers hacking away at the Hack Weekend in London, December 2013. Thanks to SK53_OSM via flickr for this photo under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Limerick is 25 km from Eire’s Shannon International Airport and it is a 30-minute journey to Limerick by connecting bus running every hour (timetable) throughout the day. If you are coming in from Shannon, Dublin or Cork airports and want or can offer a ride see our ride-sharing page.

The main venue has accommodation available for our special rate of ‚¬70 single and ‚¬100 for double/twin per night including breakfast – email gillian@kilmurrylodge.com and quote “Open Street Map” – or here are some lower cost options nearby. This WikiTravelWikiVoyage link also has more on bus, train and car hire plus other accommodation options and what to see.

The venue itself is The Kilmurry Lodge to the east of the town centre [map].

A great opportunity to meet your fellow mappers from all over the world.

The State of the Map 2008 international OpenStreetMap conference website and blog is now live and the call for participation/papers has gone out. Speaker slots are limited and like last year are bound to fill up quickly, so send us your abstracts!
The conference is being held at the Kilmurry Lodge Hotel in Limerick, Republic of Ireland on 12th and 13th July 2008.

July 12th-13th, 2008. Put that date in your diaries for next year’s State of the Map conference. The location? Well, that’s where you can help.

The OSMF has not yet settled on a location. It doesn’t have to be in the UK again – but it could be. It doesn’t have to be ‘terra incognita’ for OSM (not much mapping was done at Manchester) – but, again, it could be. But here’s what it does need to have:

Enthusiastic local OSMers who can help organise it, and who have good contacts with potential venue. Manchester worked so well because there were people on the ground prepared to put the hours in.

Good transport links. We want to encourage at least as good a turn- out as this year, hopefully better.

Like everything else in OSM, this is a call for volunteers – but the OpenStreetMap Foundation will, of course, pay reasonable expenses involved in arranging the venue. If you’re prepared to help OSM by putting the time in, you won’t be out of pocket.